lua-mode is a major mode for editing Lua sources in Emacs. After a rather long hiatus, it's back in active development stage, so make sure to visit homepage frequently enough.
If you have a problem or a suggestion about lua-mode, please, let me know about it via github's Issue Tracker.
El-get is a package manager which greatly simplifies adding modules to your Emacs and keeping them up-to-date. Once you have el-get set up, installing lua-mode can be done with
<M-x> el-get-install "lua-mode"
and updating is no more than
<M-x> el-get-update "lua-mode"`
Please, consult with el-get documentation for further information.
To install, you need to make sure that lua-mode.el is on your load-path (and optionally byte-compile
it) and to set up Emacs to automatically enable lua-mode for *.lua files or ones that contain lua
hash-bang line (#!/usr/bin/lua). Putting this snippet to .emacs should be enough in most cases:
;;;; This snippet enables lua-mode
;; This line is not necessary, if lua-mode.el is already on your load-path
(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/directory/where/lua-mode-el/resides")
(autoload 'lua-mode "lua-mode" "Lua editing mode." t)
(add-to-list 'auto-mode-alist '("\\.lua$" . lua-mode))
(add-to-list 'interpreter-mode-alist '("lua" . lua-mode))lua-mode supports some formatting and sending of lines/regions/files to a Lua interpreter. An
interpreter (see variable lua-default-application) will be started if you try to send some code and none
is running. You can use the process-buffer (named after the application you chose) as if it were an
interactive shell. See the documentation for comint.el for details.
Lua-mode also works with Hide Show minor mode (see hs-minor-mode).
Currently, there're a lot of features that need fixing (or reimplementing), including but not limited to:
- implementing autotesting of indentation engine
- supporting line-continuation commas
- fixing close-brace/paren positioning
- fix syntax handling of multiline comments/literals (including both highlighting & indentation)
- implementing a crisp scheme of customizing the way lua-mode indents the code
- cleaning up existing code
- extending docs & comments
Also, there's a rather distant goal to integrate lua-mode with cedet's semantic. This would mean an almost complete rewrite, but I think the challenge is worth it. There's a slightest concern about the overhead brought by this dependency, but semantic is already being shipped with Emacs, so there might be no problem after all.
First stage would be to rewrite syntax handling with help of semantic/wisent-generated parser based on the actual Lua grammar. Currently, syntax analysis is done ad-hoc and, despite the model is oversimplified and doesn't treat corner situation well, it's still very tricky and really hard to grasp.
And there's the cherry on the pie: after completing the wisent-generated parser, the next step will be to provide semantic with all the information it needs to do it's magic of code analysis and generation.